Listen Live on KKFI
Every Sunday at 3:00amAbout the Show
Inspired
Inspired is the nation's leading public radio show about faith, ethics and spirituality. Each week we offer you analyses of the big headlines alongside lesser-told stories – those of Orthodox Jewish artists and African-American atheists, Muslim feminists and spiritual seekers. Through these stories, a rough sketch of our country’s religious landscape begins to emerge. It’s a marketplace of beliefs and ideas too complex for sound bites, and too important to ignore.
Pioneering Black Identity in the Mormon Church
For siblings LaShawn Williams, Eunicia “Niecie” Jones and James Jones, being raised in a military family meant there were only two constants in their life: family and church. The three were raised Mormon and often were the only black members in their congregation. Moreover, they had to reconcile their faith with the painful fact that for most their church’s history before 1978, black members were denied access to the priesthood and certain blessings and rituals in the temple. Despite that fact, they all find a powerful reason to stay. Plus, we travel to the conference LaShawn, Niecie, and James organized called “The Legacy of Black LDS Pioneers,” to hear how other Mormons are confronting their church’s painful past.
One of the Few Black Rabbis in the US on Judaism’s Need to Evolve
Less than 2% of the U.S. population is Jewish, and only a very small portion of that is black. Rabbi Capers Funnye, from Beth Shalom Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation was raised in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and was actually encouraged to become a pastor. Instead, he went to rabbinical school, being ordained by an Israelite academy and becoming one of the few black rabbis in the country. He explains why more African Americans are finding their ways to his congregation from other traditions and how Judaism must become more welcoming to keep its faithful in the fold.
Leaving the Church and Gaining a Humanist Mission
Sincere Kirabo was raised Pentecostal and, by his early twenties, was a fervent believer who became a born-again Christian. But that started to change after he saw “The Da Vinci Code.” While the movie is fiction, Kirabo says it got him to question his beliefs for the first time in his life. Through a slow process over many years, he came to identify as an atheist. But Kirabo tells us that when some black Americans leave the historically black Protestant tradition, they’re also leaving behind a tight-knit community and decades of history. He says he wants to help other non-believers to find a new home by helping establish the new Black Humanist Alliance.
